Application software for electronic devices can provide useful functionality to users. A mobile application is a type of application software that is designed to run on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet computer. Mobile applications often provide users with similar services to those accessed on a desktop computing environment, but in a packaged form with limited and/or isolated functionalities.
Mobile applications are often associated with an application server within a software framework. For example, web-based mobile applications often display electronic content that is obtained from a web server that stores the electronic content. In this example, the server operates similar to an extended virtual machine for running applications, handling connections to database, and connections to a web client. In other examples, an application provides services that are made available by the application server using computer hardware on which the services run.